It’s common industry knowledge that PPC can have an effect on our organic results. But what effect is that, exactly, and how does it work? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the ways paid ads influence organic results â€” and one very important way it doesn’t.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about AdWords and how PPC, paid search results can potentially impact organic results.Now let’s be really clear. As a rule…

Paid DOES NOT DIRECTLY affect organic rankings

So many of you have probably seen the conspiracy theories out there of, “Oh, we started spending a lot on Goolge AdWords, and then our organic results went up.” Or, “Hey, we’re spending a lot with Google, but our competitor is spending even more. That must be why they’re ranking better in the organic results.” None of that is true. So there’s a bunch of protections in place. They have a real wall at Google between the paid side and the organic side. The organic folks, the engineers, the product … Read the rest

On the Wayfair SEO team, we keep track of our non-branded click curves: the average click-through rate (CTR) for each ranking position. This helps us accurately evaluate the potential opportunity of keyword clusters.

Over the last two years, the total share of organic clicks on page one of our e-commerce SERPs has dropped 25% on desktop and 55% on mobile.

For the ad-heavy non-local SERPs that we work in, paid ads are likely now earning nearly the same percentage of clicks as organic results â€” a staggering change from most of the history of Google.

Organic CTR loses 25% of click share on desktop, 55% on mobile

Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, weâ€™ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below weâ€™ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1â€“10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.

Organic receives 25% less desktop CTR and 55% less mobile CTR compared to two years ago.

The much larger drop on mobile is particularly relevant because weâ€™ve seen large traffic shifts to mobile over the last two years as well. The overall … Read the rest

Entertain the idea, for a moment, that Google assigned a quality score to organic search results. Say it was based off of click data and engagement metrics, and that it would function in a similar way to the Google AdWords quality score. How exactly might such a score work, what would it be based off of, and how could you optimize for it?

While there’s no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that’s been pondered by many SEOs over the years. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand examines this theory inside and out, then offers some advice on how one might boost such a score.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about organic quality score.

So this is a concept. This is not a real thing that we know Google definitely has. But there’s this concept that SEOs have been feeling for a long time, that similar to what Google has in their AdWords program with a paid quality score, where a page … Read the rest

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isnâ€™t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And thatâ€™s where social media kicks in â€” it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. Itâ€™s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your siteâ€™s visibility in Google? Iâ€™ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what Iâ€™ve learned so far:

Social media signals donâ€™t influence site rankings

SEO isnâ€™t effective without harnessing social media channels

In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels youâ€™re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your siteâ€™s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, … Read the rest

One of the biggest areas of speculation, contention, and confusion within the SEO universe over the past six years or so has been whether (or how much) social media signals impact organic search rankings.

But even if Google isnâ€™t directly using social share counts in their search algorithms, there ought to be some other explanation out there about why high share counts correlate with high organic search rankings.

Well, that is exactly what weâ€™re going to research in this post.

Are social shares a ranking signal?

People have noticed the connection between social shares and ranking going back to 2010. But correlating rankings and social signals has been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.

If youâ€™ve done any SEO at all, youâ€™ve probably noticed that the stories that rank well tend to have high social share counts.

These are your unicorns â€“ the extremely popular magical pieces of content that drive a ridiculous amount of traffic to your site. These types of elite “unicorn” content drive 10-1000x better results than all your other content (the donkeys).

Why do top-performing posts often also have a high number of shares? What exactly is causing these observable correlations?
… Read the rest